Opera Mini for the iPhone just got approved.
Kind of a big deal for two reasons:
1. Even on a 2g network, side-by-side demos, seen here, show Opera Mini able to completely load five pages on NYTimes.com before Safari can even download one. This is partly due to Opera’s smaller running size, and partly due to Opera’s download compression technology. Either way, it’s sweet for mobile browsing.
2. Apple’s been in plenty of hot water since launching the iPhone about rejected apps — especially considering the recent news that Apple will not allow Flash CS5-written iPhone apps to be accepted into the store. One of Apple’s key app policies is that the app not “duplicate existing iPhone functionality” which Opera, a web browser, clearly does. Yet Apple accepted it. So this could be a sign of a better attitude to come from Apple.
Check out the press release here and keep an eye on the actual release date. The app will be free for 24 hours when it first hits the app store.
Comments
Oh, apparently it’s already in the store. Better get it now while it’s free.
http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/opera-mini-web-browser/id363729560
I just tried getting it from the app store on my phone but it wasn’t letting me. I’ll have to try at home.
I never quite understood it until I read some article/blog post/something recently about Apple versus Microsoft and that old discussion. And the comment was why the Xbox is so loved and works so well but Windows does not. And it pretty simply explained the whole closed versus open development aspect in a way that I finally understood it.
Is there a closed/open reason for not allowing Flash? Would it cause more crashes or more issues?
Heh. I like that the yardstick we’re using is how fast the app loads many, many pages of The NY Times. Hipsters!
Gave Opera a whirl. It seems to work pretty well. I was never a fan of that “top sites” page that opens by default in the newer OSX Safari… but that idea works really well on a mobile phone browser, at least how Opera swings it.
I’ve noticed iPhone Safari has just mysteriously started pretending that Google image search doesn’t exist these last couple weeks. I wonder if I’m the only one having that problem.
No, that google image thing has been happening to me as well. Also I just downloaded it and not only is it slower than safari, but I sat for 2 minutes and it never opened at all. I’ll try it again later.
Ryan, that happened to me the first time I ran it as well, I gave it a couple of minutes and then tried again. It has worked perfectly since then.
Ryan, I did notice my first boot of Opera took a while. But all successive opens after that ran great. I think it has to do some caching.
Kev, it’s not so much a closed development environment as they are encouraging the use of open-source and free languages like C++ and Objective C. It’s just restricted. Apple has, for a long time, had issues with Flash because Adobe thinks they’re special enough to get access to system-level APIs that no one else does. Apple says, “no, use the carbon library like everyone else” which Adobe refuses to do and so you end up with a Flash player on the mac that is incredibly slow and buggy and crashy (which is why I use flashblock when browsing and the HTML5 beta on youtube).
So flash was never built into the iPhone/iPad OS for this reason — Apple still wasn’t willing to give Adobe special access to system-level APIs. This was good for web standards cause it meant more web developers and web sites (like youtube) started using HTML5 video instead. Bad for Adobe.
With Flash CS5, Adobe built in a feature that would take your flash-app and turn it into a native-language iPhone app. Now, I don’t know if you can fully appreciate this as someone who’s never written code before, but machines write shitty code. Remember when people used to write web sites with Microsoft Frontpage? The code it spit out was horrid. Well, Flash CS5 is the same deal. Currently there are a few apps in the store that were made with the Flash CS5 beta and they are the slowest, buggiest, crashiest things you can get. So Apple put the kibosh on that. While there are hardcore users like myself that know what to look for and no better, frankly, my mom doesn’t. And my mom would get some shitty Flash app and wonder why her phone ran like shit and blame Apple. So Apple basically said “fuck this noise, if you want to submit an iPhone app for the store, you gotta write it your damn self.”
And that’s pretty much that.